Life, my dear inadvertently captive audience, is much like encountering a northern marsupial mole — hopelessly bleak and bizarrely eyeless. Just four inches of shaggy, golden impossibility swimming beneath sand, much like my thoughts on my inevitable demise.
Indeed, who among us hasn't felt akin to a small creature blindly tunneling through the vast dunes of existence, utterly lost and seldom seen? One such creature, known to the Western Desert's Indigenous as the kakarratul, sports flipper-like feet and a distinct lack of vision, navigating life with an enviable 'out of sight, out of mind' attitude. If only oblivion were so simple for the rest of us.
"Our marsupial friend is the hardest of all animals to find," remarked an Indigenous ranger, Bobby Sands (name fictionalized to protect the probably embarrassed). And here I pause to envy that level of elusiveness, wishing I could escape my creditors with such aplomb.
Earlier this month, in a stroke of what I can only assume was dumb luck, some rangers discovered a kakarratul in the Great Sandy Desert. A place that describes both the location and the emotional texture of my last birthday party. They snapped pictures, casting these eyeless wonders into the chilling glare of the public eye - the irony!
To them, this was a scientific triumph. To me, it represents yet another day spent not dying in a tunnel, alone and unnoticed. Ah, to dream!
In tragicomic conclusion, dear reader, while you may feel lonely and unseen, take heart. At least you're not a marsupial mole, destined to swim through sand your whole life only to end up a blurry photo on a researcher’s dust-covered camera. Though, on second thoughts, perhaps that’s not the worst way to go.
Based on the original article "Swimming Beneath Sand, It’s ‘the Hardest of All Animals to Find’".
